rous vision, for that
is where humour resides; youth believes glowingly that all things
are possible, but maturity sees that to hope is not to execute, and
acquiesces smilingly in the incongruity between the programme and the
performance.

Humour resides in the perception of limitation, in discerning how often
the conventional principle is belied by the actual practice. The old
world was full of a youthful sense of its own importance; it held that
all things were created for man--that the flower was designed to yield
him colour and fragrance, that the beast of the earth was made to give
him food and sport. This philosophy was summed up in the phrase that man
was the measure of all things; but now we have learnt that man is but
the most elaborate of created organisms, and that just as there was a
time when man did not exist, so there may be a time to come when beings
infinitely more elaborate may look back to man as we look back to
trilobites--those strange creatures, like huge wood-lice, that were
in their day the glory and crown of creation. Perhaps our dreams of
supremacy and finality may be in reality the absurdest things in the
world for their pomposity and pretentiousness. Who can say?

But to retrace our steps awhile. It seems that the essence of humour
is a certain perception of incongruity. Let us take a single instance.
There is a story of a drunken man who was observed to feel his way
several times all round the railings of a London square, with the
intention apparently of finding some way of getting in. At last he sat
down, covered his face with his hands, and burst into tears, saying,
with deep pathos, "I am shut in!" In a sense it was true: if the rest
of the world was his prison, and the garden of the square represented
liberty, he was undoubtedly incarcerated. Or, again, take the story
of the Scotchman returning from a convivial occasion, who had jumped
carefully over the shadows of the lamp-posts, but on coming to the
shadow of the church-tower, ruefully took off his boots and stockings,
and turned his trousers up, saying, "I'll ha'e to wade." The reason
why the stories of drunken persons are often so indescribably humorous,
though, no doubt, highly deplorable in a Christian country, is that the
victim loses all sense of probability and proportion, and laments
unduly over an altogether imaginary difficulty. The appreciation of such
situations is in reality the same as the common and barbarous form of
h